Neuroimaging is a medical technique that allows doctors and researchers to take pictures of the inner workings of the body or brain of a patient. It can show areas with heightened activity, areas with high or low blood flow, the structure of the patients brain/body, as well as certain abnormalities. Neuroimaging is most often used to find the specific location of certain diseases or birth defects such as tumors, cancers, or clogged arteries. Neuroimaging first came about as a medical technique in the 1880's with the invention of the human circulation balance and has since lead to other inventions such as the x-ray, air ventriculography, cerebral angiography, PET/SPECT scans, magnetoencephalography, and xenon CT scanning.
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) is a facility at Florida State University, the University of Florida, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, that performs magnetic field research in physics, biology, bioengineering, chemistry, geochemistry, biochemistry. It is the only such facility in the US, and is among twelve high magnetic facilities worldwide. The lab is supported by the National Science Foundation and the state of Florida, and works in collaboration with private industry.
Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Increasingly it is also being used for quantitative research studies of brain disease and psychiatric illness. Neuroimaging is highly multidisciplinary involving neuroscience, computer science, psychology and statistics, and is not a medical specialty. Neuroimaging is sometimes confused with neuroradiology.
Kenneth Kin Man Kwong is a Hong Kong-born American nuclear physicist. He is a pioneer in human brain imaging. He received his bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Riverside studying photon-photon collision interactions.
David Cohen made many of the first pioneering measurements in the area of biomagnetism, although he was initially trained as a nuclear physicist.
Anders Martin Dale is a prominent neuroscientist and professor of radiology, neurosciences, psychiatry, and cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and is one of the world's leading developers of sophisticated computational neuroimaging techniques. He is the founding Director of the Center for Multimodal Imaging Genetics (CMIG) at UCSD.
Mark Steven Cohen is an American neuroscientist and early pioneer of functional brain imaging using magnetic resonance imaging. He currently is a Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology, Psychology, Biomedical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He is also a performing musician.
Arno Villringer is a Director at the Department of Neurology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany; Director of the Department of Cognitive Neurology at University of Leipzig Medical Center; and Academic Director of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Mind&Brain Institute, Berlin. He holds a full professorship at University of Leipzig and an honorary professorship at Charité, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From July 2022 to June 2025 he is the Chairperson of the Human Sciences Section of the Max Planck Society.
Huntington Medical Research Institutes (HMRI) is an independent, nonprofit, applied medical research organization in Pasadena, California. The Institutes conduct laboratory and clinical work for the development of technology used in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The Molecular Medicine programs, such as cancer genetics, molecular neurology, molecular pathology and tissue engineering, were conducted at the 99 North El Molino Avenue facility until April 2018. The Neural Engineering program is conducted at the 734 Fairmount Avenue building directly adjacent to Huntington Hospital. The Advanced Imaging Laboratory is located nearby at 10 Pico Street, as is the Liver Center at 660 South Fair Oaks Avenue. A new 35,000 square foot laboratory building for HMRI opened at 686 South Fair Oaks Avenue, Pasadena in April 2018. Programs in the new facility include neurolological and cardiovascular studies, as well as preeclampsia research.
Bruce Rosen is an American physicist and radiologist and a leading expert in the area of functional neuroimaging. His research for the past 30 years has focused on the development and application of physiological and functional nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, as well as new approaches to combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data with information from other modalities such as positron emission tomography (PET), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and noninvasive optical imaging. The techniques his group has developed to measure physiological and metabolic changes associated with brain activation and cerebrovascular insult are used by research centers and hospitals throughout the world.
Ferenc Andras Jolesz was a Hungarian-American physician and scientist best known for his research on image guided therapy, the process by which information derived from diagnostic imaging is used to improve the localization and targeting of diseased tissue to monitor and control treatment during surgical and interventional procedures. He pioneered the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging-guided interventions and introduced of a variety of new medical procedures based on novel combinations of imaging and therapy delivery.
James S. Hyde was an American biophysicist. He held the James S. Hyde chair in Biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) where he specialized in magnetic resonance instrumentation and methodology development in two distinct areas: electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He is senior author of the widely cited 1995 paper by B.B. Biswal et al. reporting the discovery of resting state functional connectivity (fcMRI) in the human brain. He also served as Director of the National Biomedical EPR Center, a Research Resource supported by the National Institutes of Health. He was author of more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and review articles and held 35 U.S. Patents. He was recognized by Festschrifts in both EPR and fcMRI.
Carolyn Mountford is an Australian researcher who specializes in magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging. Mountford currently holds five significant patents regarding magnetic resonance spectroscopy and is the current CEO at the Translational Research Institute (Australia).
The Gordon Center for Medical Imaging is a multidisciplinary research center at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School that develops biomedical imaging technologies.
Roderic Ivan Pettigrew is an American physicist, engineer, and physician who is CEO of EnHealth and Executive Dean for EnMed at Texas A&M University. From 2002-November 2017, he was the founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a pioneer and world expert in cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Marco Loggia is a US-based Italian neuroscientist who specializes in brain imaging. He is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and directs the Pain and Neuroinflammation Imaging Laboratory, located at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He is also the co-director of the Center of Integrative Pain NeuroImaging (CiPNI) at MGH. He is known for his work on brain mechanisms of pain, especially using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET). He has been a pioneer in the use of Arterial Spin Labeling and second-generation TSPO PET ligands for the study of chronic pain. He is a Section Editor for the journal PAIN, and also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Pain and Pain Medicine. His work has been highlighted by many media outlets, including Popular Science, New Scientist, Scientific American, ABC News, la Repubblica, Sky TG24, the Harvard Gazette and others.
Daniel Kevin Sodickson is an American physicist and an expert in the field of biomedical imaging. A past president and gold medalist of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, he is credited with foundational work in parallel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in which distributed arrays of detectors are used to gather magnetic resonance images at previously inaccessible speeds. Sodickson is an elected Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors. He currently serves as Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Radiology at New York University (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine, as Director of the department's Bernard and Irene Schwartz Center for Biomedical Imaging, as Principal Investigator of the Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research, and as Co-Director of NYU's Tech4Health Institute.
Matthew S. Rosen is an American physicist and professor.
Joseph A. Helpern is an American medical physicist who is Professor Emeritus at the Medical University of South Carolina and Director of New Vision Research. Helpern is also a Senior Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He was previously the South Carolina SmartState Endowed Chair in Brain Imaging and The Lula P. and Asa & David J. Levidow Distinguished Chair in Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the Medical University of South Carolina, and prior to that Vice Chairman for Research of the Department of Radiology at the New York University School of Medicine.
